Accounting Information Systems: The Processes and Controls, 2nd Edition

DATA ANALYSIS TOOLS (STUDY OBJECTIVE 7)

The purpose of a data warehouse is to give managers a rich source of data that they can query and examine for trends and patterns. The data warehouse allows managers to examine important patterns or trends so that they can better plan and control the business. The data warehouse can help managers examine trends such as sales by product, region, or model over a long time frame. Data in the data warehouse are analyzed by data mining and analytical processing.

Various techniques and tools have been developed to analyze data in a data warehouse, and this analysis enhances the ability of the business to meet customer needs, improve strategic planning, and increase performance. While there are many data analysis tools and techniques, this section will describe one important category of techniques and tools. The general technique is called data mining. The tools used in data mining are generally called online analytical processing (OLAP). There are special variations of OLAP called relational online analytical processing (ROLAP), and multidimensional analytical processing (MOLAP; also called data cubes). But these special types of OLAP are much more technical topics that are beyond the scope of this chapter. The descriptions here will focus on the general characteristics of data mining and OLAP.

DATA MINING

Data mining is the process of searching for identifiable patterns in data that can be used to predict future behavior. Although there are many ...